Starting an online shop to make money? Do your homework first
So I was thinking the other day just how many people I see on a daily basis starting out ecommerce sites with just the hope that they will make money (just because they are there). I suppose this attitude stems from the offline world where if you open a shop you will get a certain amount of foot traffic (and thus sales) from people who are just walking by. Thing is people just don’t stumble across your website (well not usually) as we don’t just go around typing random we addresses in with the hope that one will eventually work.
Back to the point, it’s amazing how much people will spend on the creation of a new website when it comes to design and programming compared to how little is set aside for promotion. In my opinion your promotional budget should always be a couple of times what your building costs are.
This also brings me to another very important point. If you’re hoping to be making money with this ecommerce thing for a while to come then surely you’re going to want to have this skill in house? After all SEO is a full time job do you really want to be paying money to an outside agency for the rest of your internet career? The way I see it if you are starting an online shop you have a few options when it comes to increasing your earnings with SEO.
- Go with a marketing agency. They should have a number of employees in different specialities from social media to link building, this avoids being stuck with a “jack of all trades” character. There will usually be different plans available but most people go for monthly “pay as you go” type option as its ideal for a small start-up business. The main downside that I can see is there’s no real investment going on from your own knowledge or training point of view.
- You can hire a wiz-kid SEO to work for you. Sounds simple as you could have someone working for you on a full time basis who will probably be cheaper than a marketing agency. However finding them might not be easy and they might not have as much reputation as you would like so the safety net might not be there. Also since they have to be good at everything they do need to be bit special as it takes a lot of skill (and organisation) to pull off all the aspects of net marketing.
- Learn it yourself? Sounds daunting as internet marketing is a constantly shifting landscape, do you have the time to stay up to date? If you have some IT experience then it may not be too hard to learn but others from a completely different field could struggle. Of course even if you do pay someone else to do the work it always helps to know the basics.
As you can see there’s 3 main options when it comes to increasing your sales (and hopefully money) via internet marketing but they do all have their downsides and plus points. Still internet marketing is never an overnight thing so you will probably have time to (and have to) go with all 3 methods at some point. Until next time.
Welcome to earning money online
So this is my first post here on Earning Money Online and i have to say its a very exciting time. Never before has there been the opportunity for so many people to make a second income or even fulltime wage from the internet. The great thing about the internet today is that in order to build a website you really need little or no programming knowledge. For instance setting up a blog on many of the free blogging sites is as easy as signing up for an email account on Hotmail!
So what are my methods for making money on the internet? Well im going to get into that in alot more detail in future posts but let me just that that its no-where near as difficult as you might think. The main concept that i am going to preach is getting traffic from google (if you haven’t heard of them then this may not be the blog for you!). Traffic from google really is the key because it converts into real money if you target it right. Too many people today are going after social traffic such as Twitter and Facebook without any idea how they are going to make money from these people. The key is to know what the people hitting your site are looking for. Now i know most people who come to your site will be looking for something but the key is if that thing is an item for sale. Let me explain, if someone searches on the internet for “funny videos” then its very unlikely that that person is expecting to make a sale during their time online. For a start funny videos just isn’t something anyone expects to pay for. However on the other hand if they hit up google and type in “Phone charger for Nokia 9500” then this person has a real need to buy something and thus they are much more valuable. Take it from me i would take 20 visitors looking for a phone charger over 10,000 looking for funny videos any day.
I know it may be a hard concept to understand but at its heart it really is about quality over quantity in all cases. Now i know many of you may be looking at google and thinking how can ever compete with the No1 sites at the top, especially if its a big brand site like ebay or amazon. However alot of the time these big sites are just there as a default because they have trust and not because they have necessarily done alot of work to rank for that specific keyword. Now this does not mean that they are easy to beat but in alot of cases there is more to the search engine results than meets the eye. Most of it does come down to practice but hopefully over the next weeks and months you can share my knowledge of ranking sites on google for profit, maybe ill learn something too!